creature of liminal spaces

And for today, April 13: Ada Limón. I borrowed K's copy of The Carrying to post this, since mine is back in Houston. I love this poem, and it's also one of like four or five poems on my "post this eventually" list that involves horses. We saw several horses on our drive to dinner tonight, and some of them were wearing COATS. (It's cold here.)

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn't a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

—Ada Limón, "What I Didn't Know Before," from The Carrying, 2018.

on the moon

Yesterday, Lucy and I drove to Austin and back, not to see the eclipse, but to see two wonderful friends of mine who happened to be there! They're in town for a couple of weeks, but we leave for New York and Boston on Friday and they leave Texas the same day we get back, so this was the only weekend we could manage. But we made it work, and I am so, so glad we did. Friends are so good!!

It was a long day, though, and by the time we got home I was way too tired to post a poem, even though we did go to Book People in Austin and I did buy like five new poetry books. I'll post a poem for yesterday at some point, but here is a poem for today, total solar eclipse day:

not back, let's not come back, let's go by the speed of
queer zest & stay up
there & get ourselves a little
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean
i was already moonlighting
as an online moonologist
most weekends, so this is the immensely

logical next step, are you
packing your bags yet, don't forget your
sailor moon jean jacket, let's wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,

queerer moon gravity, let's love each other
(so good) on the moon, let's love
the moon
on the moon

—Chen Chen, "i love you to the moon &," originally published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2021 and just an absolute and utter delight. Is it too cloudy to see the eclipse here? Yes. Do I care? No. It's still eclipse day! Let's love each other on the moon.

doing what she can to survive

For K, who loves Ada Limón just as much as I do, and also for the raccoon I saw sneaking behind a car in the parking lot next to my building yesterday.

I thought it was the neighbor's cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning's shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

—Ada Limón, "Give Me This," from The Hurting Kind, 2022, but originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2020.

welcome

Happy May 1, everyone. Here's my last poem for National Poetry Month 2021, and I'll see you next year. ♥

Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene’er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Come when the year’s first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter’s drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.

—Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), "Invitation to Love."

till then my windows ache

Lucy requested this one, and it's hard to argue with Neruda (or with my wife). Neruda is always fairly miraculous, in both gorgeous whole poems and truly incredible single lines, and this one is no exception.

Matilde, dónde estás? Noté, hacia abajo,
entre corbata y corazón, arriba,
cierta melancolía intercostal:
era que tú de pronto eras ausente.

Me hizo falta la luz de tu energía
y miré devorando la esperanza,
miré el vacío que es sin ti una casa,
no quedan sino trágicas ventanas.

De puro taciturno el techo escucha
caer antiguas lluvias deshojadas,
plumas, lo que la noche aprisionó:

y así te espero como casa sola
y volverás a verme y habitarme.
De otro modo me duelen las ventanas.


Matilde, where are you? Down there I noticed,
under my necktie and just above the heart,
a certain pang of grief between the ribs,
you were gone that quickly.

I needed the light of your energy,
I looked around, devouring hope.
I watched the void without you that is like a house,
nothing left but tragic windows.

Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens
to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,
to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned:

so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), LXV from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). I am grateful to Neruda that there are 100 sonnets, so I can never stop doing National Poetry Month.

only your savage heart

This poem is also for Lan Wangji, and for Wei Wuxian, and for my extraordinarily talented friend helcinda, who just posted her phenomenal vid album, The Black Parade: an Untamed Vid Album. It's a masterpiece, and I honestly don't have words for how good it is, or for how many times it has made me cry and clutch my heart with feelings. So, in honor of those feelings, here's some Pablo Neruda. I post a lot of Neruda, but let's be honest: he wrote some of the very best love poetry in any language, and I always spend at least a couple of hours narrowing down my choices. This seemed like the right one, today. ♥

De las estrellas que admiré, mojadas
por ríos y rocíos diferentes,
yo no escogí sino la que yo amaba
y desde entonces duermo con la noche.

De la ola, una ola y otra ola,
verde mar, verde frío, rama verde,
yo no escogí sino una sola ola:
la ola indivisible de tu cuerpo.

Todos las gotas, todas las raíces,
todos los hilos de la luz vinieron,
me vinieron a ver tarde o temprano.

Yo quise para mí tu cabellera.
Y de todos los dones de mi patria
sólo escogí tu corazón salvaje.


Of all the stars I admired, drenched
in various rivers and mists,
I chose only the one I love.
Since then I sleep with the night.

Of all the waves, one wave and another wave,
green sea, green chill, branchings of green,
I chose only the one wave,
the indivisible wave of your body.

All the waterdrops, all the roots,
all the threads of light gathered to me here;
they came to me sooner or later.

I wanted your hair, all for myself.
From all the graces my homeland offered
I chose only your savage heart.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XLVI from Cien sonetos de amor, or One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

begin

It's my birthday! I turn thirty-five today, not completely in isolation: I'm going out for a long walk this afternoon to pick up the lemon meringue pie I ordered from a local family-owned bakery that's still open for pick-up orders, and I have plans for a small, low-key party on zoom tonight with some friends and family. I read some fic this morning, and then a bunch of poetry, and although it's fairly overcast, it's also fairly warm, and the sun is peaking out through the clouds. There are still a lot of things worth celebrating.

For almost all of the last thirteen years, I've posted poems by either Auden or Donne—two of my very favorite, best beloved, and remarkably prolific poets—on my birthday. I haven't run out of either Auden or Donne poems (as witness the fact that I already posted a Donne poem earlier this month), but I think it's time to change the tradition. Starting this year, I will be posting poems on my birthday by new-to-me poets, or at least by poets I haven't posted before. We'll see how long this plan lasts (you never know), but let's give it a try. Here's Linda Pastan:

For Anna

Let every tree
burst into blossom
whatever the season.
Let the snow melt
mild as milk
and the new rain wash
the gutters clean
of last year's
prophecies.
Let the guns sweep out
their chambers
and the criminals doze
dreaming themselves
back to infancy.
Let the sailors throw
their crisp white caps
as high as they can
which like so many doves
will return to the ark
with lilacs.
Let the frogs turn
into princes,
the princes to frogs.
Let the madrigals,
let the musical croakings
begin.

—Linda Pastan (b. 1932), "Proclamation at a Birth" from Carnival Evening, 1998, and posted on The Writer's Almanac on April 14, 2012.

sin fronteras

I'm on vacation! This is not a poem about being on vacation. 

To live in the Borderlands means you

     are neither hispana india negra española

     ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed

     caught in the crossfire between camps

     while carrying all five races on your back

     not knowing which side to turn to, run from;

To live in the Borderlands means knowing 

     that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,

     is no longer speaking to you,

     that mexicanas call you rajetas, 

     that denying the Anglo inside you

     is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

Cuando vives en la frontera

     people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,

     you're a burra, buey, scapegoat,

     forerunner of a new race,

     half and half—both woman and man, neither—

     a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to

     put chile in the borscht,

     eat whole wheat tortillas,

     speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;

     be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;

Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to

     resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,

     the pull of the gun barrel,

     the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;

In the Borderlands

     you are the battleground

     where enemies are kin to each other;

     you are at home, a stranger,

     the border disputes have been settled

     the volley of shots have shattered the truce

     you are wounded, lost in action

     dead, fighting back;

To live in the Borderlands means

     the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off

     your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart

     pound you pinch you roll you out

     smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive the Borderlands

     you must live sin fronteras

     be a crossroads.

—Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004), "To live in the Borderlands means you," from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which is an absolutely incredible book that I cannot recommend highly enough. In the book, this poem comes with a glossary: 

gabacha—a Chicano term for a white woman 

rajetas—literally, "split," that is, having betrayed your word 

burra—donkey

buoy—oxen

sin fronteras—without borders

some days it rains

Today—or rather, yesterday, since it's after midnight—was the eighth anniversary of my brother's memorial service. His yahrzeit was a couple of weeks ago, but I always do a kind of celebration on April 5th, so here is a poem about death (and, tangentially, grief) that I really love. 

Death comes to me again, a girl

in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.

It’s not so terrible she tells me, 

not like you think, all darkness

and silence. There are windchimes

and the smell of lemons, some days

it rains, but more often the air is dry

and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase 

built from hair and bone and listen 

to the voices of the living. I like it, 

she says, shaking the dust from her hair, 

especially when they fight, and when they sing.

—Dorianne Laux, "Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl," from Smoke, 2000. 

This is for Pete, today, who I love and miss.

world is suddener

Snow in April is not that uncommon in many of the places I have lived while doing National Poetry Month, but it's uncommon enough that I don't often get to post snow poems. Today, however, as I write this on a train from Boston to New York (we just pulled into Providence), looking out at a snow-dusted New England landscape, this poem feels not only appropriate but inevitable. Or maybe I'm just saying that because my brilliant friend Allie reminded me of its existence yesterday.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

—Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), "Snow," from Poems, 1935. MacNeice was part of Auden's circle, about which I have many, many feelings. As I was looking up the date and publication information, I also stumbled across a fairly lovely short essay about this poem, for those of you who are interested in such things and/or would like some accompanying reading.

to hold off chaos at arm's length

With the exception of the inestimable John Donne, W.H. Auden is my favorite poet. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that he was exceptionally prolific, and had a kind of poetic range and breadth that's hard to match—or even, sometimes, to imagine. Auden was very, very good at what he did, and he was wry and witty and sarcastic and clever and emotional and true, sometimes all at once. I post an Auden poem every year, but it's always a challenge to figure out which one it's going to be, because there are so many that I love, for so many different reasons.

But today is my birthday, and it's one of those big round number birthdays, so let's go with this one. I post it with both irony and fondness—precisely as much irony, I have no doubt, as Auden intended; late Auden is like this a lot, and I find him delightful.

Our earth in 1969
Is not the planet I call mine,
The world, I mean, that gives me strength
To hold off chaos at arm's length.

My Eden landscapes and their climes
Are constructs from Edwardian times,
When bath-rooms took up lots of space,
And, before eating, one said Grace.

The automobile, the aeroplane,
Are useful gadgets, but profane:
The enginry of which I dream
Is moved by water or by steam.

Reason requires that I approve
The light-bulb which I cannot love:
To me more reverence-commanding
A fish-tail burner on the landing.

My family ghosts I fought and routed,
Their values, though, I never doubted:
I thought the Protestant Work-Ethic
Both practical and sympathetic.

When couples played or sang duets,
It was immoral to have debts:
I shall continue till I die
To pay in cash for what I buy.

The Book of Common Prayer we knew
Was that of 1662:
Though with-it sermons may be well,
Liturgical reforms are hell.

Sex was of course—it always is—
The most enticing of mysteries,
But news-stands did not then supply
Manichaean pornography.

Then Speech was mannerly, an Art,
Like learning not to belch or fart:
I cannot settle which is worse,
The Anti-Novel or Free Verse.

Nor are those Ph.D's my kith,
Who dig the symbol and the myth:
I count myself a man of letters
Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters.

Dare any call Permissiveness
An educational success?
Saner those class-rooms which I sat in,
Compelled to study Greek and Latin.

Though I suspect the term is crap,
If there is a Generation Gap,
Who is to blame? Those, old or young,
Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue.

But Love, at least, is not a state
Either en vogue or out-of-date,
And I've true friends, I will allow,
To talk and eat with here and now.

Me alienated? Bosh! It's just
As a sworn citizen who must
Skirmish with it that I feel
Most at home with what is Real.

—W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "Doggerel by a Senior Citizen," for Robert Lederer, May 1969.

tell a new story

Is it still the 13th? I had a surprisingly busy day. Here is a poem that is excellent to read late at night, and is also by a friend of mine! My friend Charlie has been spending National Poetry Month Aprils with me since my very first year of posting poems, a million years ago in 2007 when we were both in college, and now he is a published poet! HOW COOL IS THAT? I love this poem.

The night the paintings opened, we
were young again,
outside the lines and still wet. Your feet
left blue on the marble floor when you
came over with your guitar and
gave me a lopsided wink. I finally
put down that goddamned hairbrush and
shook out my curls, smears of carmine
sliding on your skin like the heart
your artist had decided
was broken. We
were hungry, so
ducking between the sprinkler systems
and the flames, we
stole some of Cézanne’s peaches and
ran out to tell a new story.

—Charlie Byrd, "Pentimento," published in Liminality Issue No. 2, Winter 2014/2015, here.

island

Rita Dove, always and forever.

Shape the lips to an o, say a.
That's island.

One word of Swedish has changed the whole neighborhood.
When I look up, the yellow house on the corner
is a galleon stranded in flowers. Around it

the wind. Even the high roar of a leaf-mulcher
could be the horn-blast from a ship
as it skirts to the misted shoals.

We don't need much more to keep things going.
Families complete themselves
and refuse to budge from the present,
the present extends its glass forehead to sea
(backyard breezes, scattered cardinals)

and if, one evening, the house on the corner
took off over the marshland,
neither I nor my neighbor
would be amazed. Sometimes

a word is found so right it trembles
at the slightest explanation.
You start out with one thing, end
up with another, and nothing's
like it used to be, not even the future.

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Ö" from The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.

this world's profane loveliness

This is a particularly rough week for my friend K, and she asked if she could make a request. Then she sent me this poem.

Here is a thing about graduate school: it can be miserable, and lonely, and isolating, but when you form a real and lasting friendship in the grad school trenches, it matters. It matters for its rarity, and because you've gone through a particular kind of hell together that also comes with some truly glorious high points; on the one hand, you're crying on the phone at two in the morning because you might need to quit the program, and on the other hand, the next day you spend three hours talking about John Donne. Which is all to say that this is for K, who is, along with John Donne and poems like this one, my light in the darkness of graduate school.

1.

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—
Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea
glimmering in pale beneath a starless black. . .

2.

No, scratch that too. I'm all exotic
metaphor, inkhorn snarls, never content
with the unelaborated thing;

always the forced apotheosis,
every least sparrow a visible sign,
strong-arming water to wine. So tenderly

I love this world's profane loveliness,
its small, scarce loveliness, like a puritan
I batter magnitude out of homespun.

3.

Faithless my zeal, for the puritan's faith
imputes us all with a roughhouse grace, most
lovely in our brokenness, bruised and bent

to glory. Scratch that—to sufficiency.
Start again: The stars are black with storms
blown shoreward; the dinoflagellates

smacked on the shoals leak light from shattered cells;
they phosphoresce the breakers in their roister.
Let me sing, then, the beauty of creatures

microscopic, who make the vastness gleam
in smithereens.

4.

                       See: starlike, after all.

—Kimberly Johnson (b. 1971), "Easter, Looking Westward." Originally published in The Journal, Ohio State University, 2006.

I heard Kimberly Johnson read some of her poetry last year, and—as I think this poem demonstrates very well—she's really extraordinary. She's also a professor of Renaissance literature, which is sort of reassuring to me personally. I think this poem is breathtaking regardless of its references, but that said, John Donne's Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward is certainly worth reading or rereading, especially today.

screw poetry

I missed posting a poem yesterday, and today I am having a pretty shitty day. Here is a poem about the inadequacy of poetry; it's also a love poem. (I think I read more love poetry in hard times than in good times, which probably says something really interestingly psychological about me, but who the fuck knows what.)

Late night and rain wakes me, a downpour,
wind thrashing in the leaves, huge
ears, huge feathers,
like some chased animal, a giant
dog or wild boar. Thunder & shivering
windows; from the tin roof
the rush of water.

I lie askew under the net,
tangled in damp cloth, salt in my hair.
When this clears there will be fireflies
& stars, brighter than anywhere,
which I could contemplate at times
of panic. Lightyears, think of it.

Screw poetry, it's you I want,
your taste, rain
on you, mouth on your skin.

—Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), "Late Night"

by many names is thine

Even now that Care which on thy Crowne attends
and with thy happy greatnes dayly growes
Tells mee thrise sacred Queene my Muse offends,
and of respect to thee the line outgoes,
One instant will, or willing can shee lose
I say not reading, but receiving Rimes,
On whom in chiefe dependeth to dispose
what Europe acts in theise most active times?

Yet dare I so, as humblenes may dare
cherish some hope they shall acceptance finde;
not waighing less thy state, lighter thy Care,
but knowing more thy grace, abler thy minde.
What heav'nly powrs thee highest throne assign'de,
assign'd thee goodnes suting that Degree:
and by thy strength thy burthen so defin'de,
To others toile, is Exercise to thee.

Cares though still great, cannot bee greatest still,
Busines most ebb, though Leasure never flowe:
Then these the Postes of Dutie and Goodwill
shall presse to offer what their Senders owe;
Which once in two, now in one Subject goe,
the poorer left, the richer reft awaye:
Who better might (O might ah word of woe.)
have giv'n for mee what I for him defraye.

How can I name whom sighing sighes extend,
and not unstopp my teares eternall spring?
but hee did warpe, I weav'd this webb to end;
the stuffe not ours, our worke no curious thing,
Wherein yet well wee thought the Psalmist King
Now English denizend, though Hebrue borne,
woold to thy musicke undispleased sing,
Oft having worse, without repining worne;

And I the Cloth in both our names present,
A liverie robe to bee bestowed by thee:
small parcell of that undischarged rent,
from which nor paines, nor paiments can us free.
And yet enough to cause our neighbours see
wee will our best, though scanted in our will:
and those nighe feelds where sow'n thy favors bee
unwalthy doo, not elce unworthie till.

for in our worke what bring wee but thine owne?
What English is, by many names is thine.
There humble Lawrells in thy shadowes growne
To garland others woold, themselves repine.
Thy brest the Cabinet, thy seat the shrine,
where Muses hang their vowed memories:
where Wit, where Art, where all that is divine
conceived best, and best defended lies.

Which if men did not (as they doe) confesse,
and wronging worlds woold otherwise consent:
Yet here who mynds so meet a Patrones
for Authors state or writings argument?
A King should onely to a Queene bee sent.
Gods loved choise unto his chosen love:
Devotion to Devotions President:
what all applaud, to her whom none reprove.

And who sees ought, but sees how justly square
his haughtie Ditties to thy glorious daies?
How well beseeming thee his Triumphs are?
his hope, his zeale, his praier, plaint, and praise,
Needles thy person to their height to raise:
lesse need to bend them downe to thy degree:
Theise holy garments each good soule assaies,
some sorting all, all sort to none but thee.

For ev'n thy Rule is painted in his Raigne:
booth cleere in right: both nigh by wrong opprest:
And each at length (man crossing God in vaine)
Possest of place, and each in peace possest.
proud Philistines did interrupt his rest,
The foes of heav'n no lesse have beene thy foes;
Hee with great conquest, though with greater blest;
Thou sure to winn, and hee secure to lose.

Thus hand in hand with him thy glories walke:
but who can trace them where alone they goe?
Of thee two hemispheres on honor talke,
and Lands and seas thy Trophees jointly showe.
The very windes did on thy partie blowe,
and rocks in armes thy foe men eft defie:
But soft my muse, Thy pitch is earthly lowe;
forbeare this heav'n, where onely Eagles flie.

Kings on a Queene enforst their states to lay;
Main-lands for Empire waiting on an Ile;
Men drawn by worth a woman to obay;
one moving all, herselfe unmov'd the while:
Truthes restitution, vanitie exile,
wealth sprung of want, warr held without annoye,
Let subject bee of some inspired stile,
Till then the object of her subjects joye.

Thy utmost can but offer to hir sight
Her handmaids taske, which most her will endeeres;
and pray unto thy paines life from that light
which lively lightsome Court, and Kingdome cheeres,
What wish shee may (farre past hir living Peeres
and Rivall still to Judas Faithfull King)
In more then hee and more triumphant yeares,
Sing what God doth, and doo what men may sing.

—Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, "Even Now That Care," 1599. This is the dedicatory poem to Queen Elizabeth in the Tixall Manuscript of the Sidney translation of the Psalms. I was originally planning to post Mary Sidney's elegy to her brother, today—it's also a prefatory poem to the Sidney Psalter, and is called "To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney"—and I do love that poem; but I love this one rather more, for a lot of reasons.

and seven planets blazing in her hair

It's my birthday! I HAVE SURVIVED THE YEAR OF ROCKSTAR DEATH. Today's celebratory plans involve lighting cupcakes on fire with a blowtorch, so I may not survive the year of rockstar death by very much, but at least I will have a good time. (Possibly we should invite the firemen from next door to my party.) I've already been out to brunch, and put on a lot of glittery eye makeup; later this afternoon, we are having a bunch of people over for a birthday shindig, because I have great friends, and I think my birthday is a pretty good excuse to have a party. I flatly refuse to have anything other than an excellent day. What else are birthdays for?

Well. Birthdays are also for Auden. It's actually sort of shocking that I haven't posted this one, before.

By all means sing of love but, if you do,
Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo:
When ladies ask How much do you love me?
The Christian answer is cosi-cosi;
But poets are not celibate divines:
Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks,
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons;
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.

Suppose your Beatrice be, as usual, late,
And you would tell us how it feels to wait,
You're free to think, what may be even true,
You're so in love that one hour seems like two,
But write—As I sat waiting for her call,
Each second longer darker seemed than all
(Something like this but more elaborate still)
Those raining centuries it took to fill
That quarry whence Endymion's Love was torn;
From such ingenious fibs are poems born.
Then, should she leave you for some other guy,
Or ruin you with debts, or go and die,
No metaphor, remember, can express
A real historical unhappiness;
Your tears have value if they make us gay;
Oh Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.

The living girl's your business (some odd sorts
Have been an inspiration to men's thoughts):
Yours may be old enough to be your mother,
Or have one leg that's shorter than the other,
Or play Lacrosse or do the Modern Dance,
To you that's destiny, to us it's chance;
We cannot love your love till she takes on,
Through you, the wonders of a paragon.
Sing her triumphant passage to our land,
The sun her footstool, the moon in her right hand,
And seven planets blazing in her hair,
Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air;
Tell how her fleet by nine king swans is led,
Wild geese write magic letters overhead
And hippocampi follow in her wake
With Amphisboene, gentle for her sake;
Sing her descent on the exulting shore
To bless the vines and put an end to war.

If half-way through such praises of your dear,
Riot and shooting fill the streets with fear,
And overnight as in some terror dream
Poets are suspect with the New Regime,
Stick at your desk and hold your panic in,
What you are writing may still save your skin:
Re-sex the pronouns, add a few details,
And, lo, a panegyric ode which hails
(How is the Censor, bless his heart, to know?)
The new pot-bellied Generalissimo.
Some epithets, of course, like lily-breasted
Need modifying to say, lion-chested,
A title Goddess of wry-necks and wrens
To Great Reticulator of the fens,
But in an hour your poem qualifies
For a State pension or His annual prize,
And you will die in bed (which He will not:
That public nuisance will be hanged or shot).
Though honest Iagos, true to form, will write
Shame! in your margins, Toady! Hypocrite!,
True hearts, clear heads will hear the note of glory
And put inverted commas round the story,
Thinking—Old Sly-boots! We shall never know
Her name or nature. Well, it's better so.

For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales, the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "'The Truest Poetry Is The Most Feigning'," September 1953. This is one of my favorite versions of Auden: acerbic and brilliant, and a little wry, and a lot meta, sarcastic and sharp and kind of bitter (also totally right about the myth of plain style, come the fuck on), and kind of right about the things poetry can't do; and yet also forever believing in poetry, despite everything, and against all odds (true hearts, clear heads). I really, really love Auden.

language uncommon and agile as truth

Some days are Adrienne Rich days, and there's just nothing you can do about it except post some Adrienne Rich. I usually love her poetry, so this is not a hardship.

(I have more mixed feelings about her politics, which were sometimes phenomenally feminist and groundbreaking and wonderful, and sometimes deeply problematic and transphobic; but if I stopped loving poets because I disagreed with some of their politics I would be super screwed when it comes to most poetry. It is, as always—at least, I think so—very much worth being aware of the nuance and complexity and occasional awfulness of people and their ideas; but that doesn't mean you can't love some (or even a lot) of what they have to say, even while you hate some of the other things they have to say. Loving problematic things.)

If I've reached for your lines   (I have)
   like letters from the dead that stir the nerves
dowsed you for a springhead
   to water my thirst
dug into my compost skeleton and petals
   you surely meant to catch the light:

—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered
   stateless underground
      have I a plea?

If I've touched your finger
   with a ravenous tongue
      licked from your palm a rift of salt
if I've dreamt or thought you
   a pack of blood   fresh-drawn
      hanging darkred from a hook
higher than my heart
   (you who understand transfusion)
      where else should I appeal?

A pilot light lies low
   while the gas jets sleep
      (a cat getting toed from stove
into nocturnal ice)
   language uncommon and agile as truth
      melts down the most intractable silence

A lighthouse keeper's ethics:
   you tend for all or none
      for this you might set your furniture on fire
A this we have blundered over
   as if the lamp could be shut off at will
      rescue denied for some

and still a lighthouse be

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "For This" from Fox, 1999.

In not entirely unrelated news, I have been feeling exceptionally lucky in my friends and chosen family, this week. You guys are great, you know that?

hands on the openable book

A couple of weeks ago I was having a really extraordinarily bad day, and Molly sent me this poem. Sending me this poem was a really good call.

Just days ago we sat upon this rock
Watching the ignorant armies marching past
With the scholar's sense of knowing more than they.
Now you are in England
And the soldiers somewhere as grave,
And I seem to know nothing at all.
Oh, I can name you stones, planets, stars,
By Agricola, Linnaeus, and Tycho;
Words I know, objects, machineries, but mechanism
Has ceased to be sufficient for events.
I still do not believe in ghosts, say I.
A lamp burns blue from gasses in the flame,
Light blooms in unstruck conduits of the eye
And the shape-seeking mind gives it shadow substance:
I saw a phosphene with a silvered beard.
It was easier for the others: they believed.
Unpolished by the wheels of Wittenberg
They roughly knew that death sleeps not
When trouble wakes it. We were so very cold.
What did you see by darkness, then? Your mind
Had always a good eye, and your soul
Always a muted voice. Some recollection
Was it, some fatherly advice
On power, trust, and counsels in the court
Rose up to haunt you, and you called it Father.
Why there I have deduced it, QED.
I will believe that men are stricken mad
When I can think naught else, as I believe
That they are dead when I do see a corpse.
Recall that night in the days of our study
We went up to the tower in Wittenberg
Because the old professor, Johann Faust
The wondersmith, the one who could not choose
If God had mercy, promised us a wonder.
Shortly he gave it, with his body and crossed timbers
And a thunderclap. Demons, you said,
Had rent him. I never thought you
More than metaphorical. Surely
Something in an alembic had gone wrong,
A spark touched to a firework, perhaps
Those strange heavy metals he said were Philosopher's Stone.
He swore he could wall Germany with brass
And all knew he meant cannon: Gustavus Aldophus
Taught the world that trick. You and Rosencrantz and I
Looked on Faustus in pieces among his instruments:
Thence Ros went off to form that fond attachment
To Guildenstern with his horrid clarinet,
Flowering Narcissus. You said demons,
Meaning more I think now than I thought then.
I confess to this air that I saw first and mainly
Anatomized Man, in exploded view,
And wondered which of all those riven vessels,
Those open hollow parts, had spilled his soul.
There's a mystery wants answering.
You did not stab Polonius in the brains,
Nor heart, nor anything particularly.
(The doctors never thought to open him;
A lung, the liver portal veins, I'd guess.)
You did not stay to see the transference
Of wounds. Your thrust went further than you know.
Here is where we define Horatio's courage.
If I put this message to paper and ink
Instead of casting it on water after you
Would I tell you, reasonable friend,
How Ophelia's reason cries out in its sleep?
They gave me charge of the distracted maiden,
Thinking her safe thus, I suppose;
How flattering to my mind. Though safe she was,
Not just because she was, in my faith, yours,
But out of simple fear. Not simple. Mine.
I think she knew it. It was she who kissed
My palms as if they smoked, then ran, light-foot,
Trailing blossoms, laughing. Laughing, laughing,
There was never such laughter at Wittenberg,
Nor demons either. And now the girl is tended
By some old hen who fears to go near water.
Does any of this matter to you, damn it,
Who turned her aside for reasons I trust are good
Who'd have her without taking her? At school
You thought on sex. I heard you through the walls.
Of course it's not a cloud of autumn light;
It's awkward and it's noisy and it's humid
And leaves you feeling half like Jupiter
And one third set to vomit. Do I shock you?
Oh yes, friend, women have delighted me,
As, I should hope, I them. Consider it
Research, hands on the openable book,
Affording here and there to the caring student
A subtle glimpse of Time and God.
No. No. It is my faith to understand,
Not to disprove, your motives. I would know,
And now that I am here, I think I do.
My parents' house had walls and doors and roof,
Elsinore none of these. The place is open
As diagram in a book; here read the legend:
A represents a whispering-gallery,
B indicating a confessor's alcove,
C shows a hollow underneath the stairs.
This is no house, it is a theatre,
A cockpit in continuous performance,
All actors, all audience, no interval.
You hurt me when you would not take my oath
Of silence, but you did not mean to do:
You only knew your ground, the listeners' kingdom,
Where intimacy's the rarest paradox.
I wonder if this place does wound the mind,
Echoing nights with auditors and ghosts
(Memories I mean, the ghosts I will acknowledge)
Toxic with stone-dust, lead in wine and paint,
The moldy wheat that dements villages?
It is the time, near war, too near to death,
The witchfinder's needle bearing down,
Demanding, scream or be burned alive?
I learned in Wittenberg, I learn here
To watch men die and women suffer
With the same Apollonian detachment I kept
For the droppings of unidentified wildlife
And tumors in jars, driven by the passion
Of glands undiscoverable by knife, and the thought
That the world might not be left
So bad as when one entered;
If demonless Wittenberg and haunted Elsinore
Were brought together in some essential coitus
Would the child be good?
Gone friend, what do you dream
What my philosophy dreams of?
Words fall in water, and the world shall end
No different for Horatio's tenancy.
Down yonder hill two clowns are digging holes
For dead men. Every doctor knows
Whence comes his study-matter; I'll go there
And see if spades have brought up interest.
There's motion, out to sea. A pirate sail,
Black sheet on silver water. That's a legend:
Of grief and trouble come to royal fathers,
Trouble and grief come unto princely sons.

—John M. Ford (1957-2006), "Letter from Elsinore," 1993. (In this case, from Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, 2004).

I love so many things about this poem. I love how it positions Hamlet in history, how the play exists (as it really must) in the same world as Faustus; I love Horatio, and I love that we know what comes after this -- a pirate sail -- and Horatio sort of does, too, but not quite, because he's in the middle of the story; I love that the poem is both about renaissance education and lives in a world of renaissance education, as a letter, and as a fictional letter imagined from one fictional character to another (cf. Ovid's Heroides); and of course, I love that it's a transformative work.

Happy birthday, Mike.

sunlight darkness

"Worse than the sunflower," she had said.
But the new dimension of truth had only recently
Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned.
And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten.
In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed.
Tired housewives begat it some decades ago,
A small piece of truth that is it was honey to the lips
Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.
You see how honey crumbles your universe
Which seems like an institution – how many walls?

Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged
And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end
And no attitude which, in the end, would save you.
The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped
                              in death's capacious claw
But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper –
There was a key to everything in that oak forest
But a sad one. Ever since childhood there
Has been this special meaning to everything.
You smile at your friend's joke, but only later, through tears.

For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.
Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the
                               world’s ailments and troubles.
There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation.
Once the harvest is in and the animals put away for the winter
To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert
With salt tears which will never do anyone any good.
My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows.
Perfume my head with forgetting all around me.

For some day these projects will return.
The funereal voyage over ice-strewn seas is ended.
You wake up forgetting. Already
Daylight shakes you in the yard.
The hands remain empty. They are constructing an osier basket
Just now, and across the sunlight darkness is taking root anew
In intense activity. You shall never have seen it just this way
And that is to be your one reward.

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.
The night is cold and delicate and full of angels
Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,
The chime goes unheard.
We are together at last, though far apart.

—John Ashbery (b. 1927), "The Ecclesiast" from Rivers and Mountains, 1966. Some of you may recognize the last stanza from the epigraphs to Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.

For my brother (who would probably have hated this poem, but as he is dead he does not get a vote), and with thanks to starlady.